Elon Musk will be stepping down as head of Twitter after he lost a poll he run on his account.
In October this year, Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion (about 60 trillion Malawi Kwacha). Money used to buy Twitter can finance Malawi’s national budget for nearly 20 years.
Musk promised to protect free speech Twitter unlike the previous owners who he said were ‘easily’ offended and targeted people with dissident views.
Following the acquisition, a trove of leaks known as Twitter Files have been revealing how the company connived with US officials and politicians to censor the platform.
Several high ranking platforms such as that of the former US president Donald Trump were either suspended or shadow banned.
Shadow banning occurs when Twitter suppresses tweets and topics from specific accounts. Such tweets would hardly appear on timelines. Shadow banned topics and accounts would be barred from trending.
Elon Musk’s era promised to end shadow banning of accounts. He restored Donald Trump’s twitter account. Trump is yet to tweet from his restored account – preferring to stay with his Truth Social.
However, it emerged last week that Twitter accounts that disagreed with Elon Musk were targeted and banned without due diligence.
One account @elonjet run by Florida college student Jack Sweeney was banned. Elon Jet tracks the location of Musk’s private jet using publicly available flight data.
Musk defended the ban saying the account put him at risk of assassination. The account remains banned.
People on the left wing of politics have also accused Mr Musk of cosying up to the distant right.
Last week, several journalists were banned or suspended from the social media platform.
The company did not give any explanation for the purge.
This weekend, Twitter had also banned all links to Facebook, Instagram, Mastodon, Truth Social, Tribel, Nostr, Post and other competing social media platforms. Twitter threatened to act against users that violate this policy.
However, the company has reversed its policy to ban other social media platforms.
Following a wild 48 hours, Elon Musk carried a poll on his account asking if he should continue to head Twitter.
“Should I step down as head of Twitter? I will abide by the results of this poll”, he quizzed.
More than 57 per cent of voters have asked him to step down.
